Sudan rescuers say air strike killed 23 in Khartoum market

The war has also created the world’s largest displacement crisis, the UN says. (File/AFP)
Short Url
Updated 13 October 2024
Follow

Sudan rescuers say air strike killed 23 in Khartoum market

  • The market is near one of the main camps in the Sudanese capital, where the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been fighting the military as part of a civil war

POST SUDEN: A Sudanese network of volunteer rescuers said on Sunday the military carried out an air strike a day earlier on a marketplace in Khartoum, leaving 23 people dead.
The market is near one of the main camps in the Sudanese capital, where the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been fighting the military as part of a civil war that has killed tens of thousands of people.
“Twenty-three people were confirmed dead and more than 40 others wounded” and taken to hospital after “military air strikes on Saturday afternoon on the main market” in southern Khartoum, the youth-led Emergency Response Rooms said in a post on Facebook.
Fierce fighting has raged since Friday around Khartoum, much of which is controlled by the RSF, with the military pounding the center and south of the city from the air.
The military is advancing toward Khartoum from nearby Omdurman, where clashes erupted on Saturday, eyewitnesses said.

Since April 2023, when war broke out between army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and his former deputy, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, the paramilitaries had largely pushed the army out of Khartoum.
The World Health Organization says at least 20,000 people have been killed in the civil war, but some estimates put the toll much higher at up to 150,000.
The war has also created the world’s largest displacement crisis, the UN says.
More than 10 million people, around a fifth of Sudan’s population, have been forced from their homes, according to UN figures.
A UN-backed assessment in August declared a famine in the Zamzam refugee camp in Darfur near the city of El-Fasher.
The government loyal to the army is based in Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast, where the army has retained control.
The RSF meanwhile has taken control of nearly all of the vast western region of Darfur, rampaged through the agricultural heartland of central Sudan and pushed into the army-controlled southeast.


Security officer arrested over Syria killings: official

Updated 4 sec ago
Follow

Security officer arrested over Syria killings: official

DAMASCUS: Syria’s authorities have arrested an internal security officer as a suspect in the killing of four civilians in the majority-Druze Sweida province, the local internal security chief said.
Four people were shot dead and a fifth seriously wounded in the incident on Saturday, in the village of Al-Matana, said Hossam Al-Tahan, the state news agency SANA reported.
The initial investigation, carried out with the help of one of the survivors of the attack, indicated that one suspect was a member of the local Internal Security Directorate, he said.
“The officer was immediately detained and referred for investigation,” he added.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights had earlier reported that four people were killed and a fifth wounded by gunfire from unknown assailants as they were harvesting olives.
The authorities had cleared the olive pickers to be in the northern part of the province controlled by government forces, it added.
Sweida province is the stronghold of the Druze minority in the south of the country.
Violence erupted there briefly in July last year, with clashes between Druze fighters and Sunni Bedouin that rapidly escalated, drawing in government forces and tribal fighters from other parts of Syria.
Syrian authorities have said their forces intervened to stop the clashes, but witnesses, Druze factions and the London-based Observatory have accused them of siding with the Bedouin and committing abuses against the Druze.
Although a ceasefire was reached later that month, the situation remained tense and access to Sweida difficult.
Residents accuse the government of having imposed a blockade on the province, from which tens of thousands of inhabitants have fled — a charge Damascus denies.
Several aid convoys have entered since then.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, more than 185,000 people remain uprooted.